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CHAPTER IV

Traversing a narrow, winding bridle track, he soon reached the river. A broad belt of white sand stretched on either side for some little distance, the water glistening like polished mirrors in its smooth, deep reaches. Here and there it broke into a thousand tiny silver-crested waves, created by the inequalities in the ground. Farther on the main stream twisted into great clusters of dark green river oaks, and was lost to view. The white sands narrowed, and were replaced by rocks, covered with moss and lichen, and here a bark canoe was moored. Stepping on a large boulder, Basil jumped into the canoe, and loosening the rope, paddled down stream. The water ran like a mill race, and presently divided into two streams, beautified by waterfalls and fairy islands adorned with luxuriant vegetation. This dividing of the waters extended only some three or four hundred yards, at the termination of which they were united in one dark lagoon. A strange stillness reigned upon the surface of the water, but this sign of peace was insincere, the current in reality running hard and strong. Round about the canoe floated masses of white and mauve water lilies; in parts the huge leaves formed a perfect carpet, which easily supported the light weight of the lotus birds as they skipped from shore to shore. At the lower end of the lagoon the stream became so narrow that a man could jump across it, and here Basil left his canoe, and plunged into the woods to find Annette.

She was sitting on a great patch of velvet moss, idling with some flowers of the wax plant and the yellow hibiscus. Her back was towards Basil, who stepped softly, intending to surprise her, but the crackling of the leaves betrayed him. She turned quickly, and jumping up, ran to meet him.

"I have been waiting for you ever so long," she said, and she slipped her hand into his.

Basil made no excuse for being late; an age seemed to have passed since he had last seen her, though scarcely three hours separated "then" from "now." But short as was really the interval it had effected an important alteration in their relations towards each other, and the contemplation of this change made him silent. Neither was Annette as talkative as usual, and they strolled idly along for some distance without exchanging a word. Basil had hitherto accepted Annette's beauty in a general sense; she was pretty, she was bright, she was full of vivacity-that was all. Had she been a woman he would have subjected her to a closer and more analytical observation, for he had an artist's eye for beauty, and loved to look at it in animate and inanimate nature; but Annette was only a child, and he had paid her just that amount of attention which one pays to small wild-flowers that grow by the wayside. But now, looking down upon her as she walked by his side, he observed that her eyes were hazel, and he said to himself that hazel eyes, in girl and woman, were the most beautiful eyes in the world. The hazel colour in the eyes he was gazing upon was brilliant, and Basil said to himself that it was the brilliant hazel eyes that are the most beautiful in the world. Annette's features were not exactly regular, but formed as fair a picture of human loveliness as a man would wish to see, her lips sweetly curved, her teeth white and shapely, her ears like little shells, her golden brown hair gathered carelessly about the gracefully shaped head. Yes, Annette was beautiful even now as a child; how much more beautiful was she likely to be when her springtime was fully set in!

Raising her head suddenly she saw that Basil was gazing at her more earnestly and closely than he was in the habit of doing. "I was looking at your eyes, Annette," he said, rather guiltily. "I never noticed their colour till to-day."

"They are hazel. Do you like hazel eyes?"

"Very much."

"I am glad of that. My eyes are like my mother's. Will you come with me?"

"Where?"

"To her grave."

He had visited it before with Annette, and they now walked towards the canoe, gathering wild flowers as they walked. Once Annette slipped, and he caught her and held her up; there was an unusual tenderness in the action, and Annette nestled closer to him, and smiled happily. In the canoe her skilful fingers were busily at work, weaving the flowers they had gathered into garlands to lay upon her mother's grave. She had a special gift in such-like graceful tasks, but then her heart was in her fingers. The loving homage was reverently rendered when they reached the spot, and Basil assisted her in clearing the dead leaves and in planting some fresh roots she had brought with her from the woods.

Her task accomplished, Annette sat beside the grave, with a wistful expression on her face which made Basil wonder what was stirring in her mind. He waited for her to break the silence, and presently she spoke.

"What makes you so quiet, Basil?"

"I do not know. Perhaps it is because you have said so little, Annette."

"I have been thinking."

"Yes."

"I wanted all day to speak to you about it. I thought I would when we were in the wood alone; then you spoke of my eyes and I thought of my dear mother. You would have loved her, Basil, and she would have loved you. She hears me now-yes, she hears and sees me, Basil, and I think she is glad you came to us."

"I am glad too, Annette."

"Really glad, Basil?"

"Really glad, Annette."

"Then you will not go away from us?"

"What makes you ask that?" Her question, tremulously uttered, formed a pregnant link in the promise he had given her father.

"It is my dream," said Annette. "I dreamt it last night, and it made me sad. You came to say good-bye, and I was unhappy at the thought that I should never see you again. Basil, if that was to happen I should be sorry you ever came at all."

"Then you wish me to stay?"

"Dearly, Basil, dearly! I thought I would speak to father about it; then I thought I would speak to you first."

"Did you not speak to your father?"

"Not about my dream; but about your going away, yes. I asked him to persuade you to stop with us."

"Because, Annette-" he said, and paused. "Because I love you, Basil. I told father so, and he said he loved you, too, and that he wished he had a son like you. Then you would be my brother, and I should be very happy. But father said he was afraid you intended to leave us soon, and that made me dream, I suppose."

"Annette, listen to me."

"I am listening, Basil."

"Your father has spoken to me, and that is why I was so late in coming to you. He asked me to remain here, and I promised him I would."

"You did? Oh, Basil!" Her voice expressed the most perfect joy. She had risen in her excitement, and was now leaning towards him, her lips parted, her eyes glowing.

"Yes, Annette, I promised him, and I promise you. For some years at least we will live together."

She threw her arms round his neck, and kissed him.

"That will be for ever, Basil. You have made me do happy, so happy!"

"So that is all settled," he said. "But I shall be a tyrant, Annette."

"I don't mind, Basil; I will be very good and obedient. Do you hear, Bruno, do you hear?" She knelt and kissed the faithful dog, and pressed his head to her bosom. "Basil is not going away. He will remain here forever-for ever!"

Basil was very grateful for the little maid's affection, grateful that his lines had fallen in such pleasant places. What more could man desire? But there was a shadow gathering and swiftly approaching which neither of them could see.

They stopped out later than usual that evening, and when they returned to the house Annette was radiant.

"Basil has promised to remain with us, father," she said, in a voice of great joy.

"He has told you, then, dear child?"

"Yes, father, yes. He will stop with us for ever. I don't wish for anything now."

The three happy beings sat together in the verandah during the few brief minutes that divided day and night. In those latitudes there is but little twilight, and the long peaceful rest of an English sunset is unknown. For a few moments the brilliancy was dazzling. Great clouds of amethyst and ruby spread over the western skies, melting soon into sombre shades of purple and crimson. Then the sun dipped down and disappeared, and the skies were overspread with a veil of faded gold, behind which the white stars glittered.

Their souls were in harmony with the spiritual influence of the lovely scene, and there was an ineffable peace in their hearts. Annette kissed Basil before she retired to rest, and whispered: "Brother Basil, I shall have happier dreams to-night."

He kissed her tenderly, and bade her good-night. Unclouded happiness shone in her eyes as she stole to her room, where she knelt by her bedside, and uttered the name of Basil in her prayers.

Anthony Bidaud gazed at his daughter till she entered the house, and even then kept his eyes fixed upon the door through which she had disappeared.

"It is years," he said to Basil, "since I have felt so thoroughly content as I do to-night. Come to my room early in the morning; I shall not write to my lawyer till then, and I wish you to see the letter."

Shortly after all the inmates of the house were asleep.

* * * * * *

And while they slept, there walked across the distant plains towards the plantation, a man and a woman who had had that goal in view for three months past. It was summer when they left their home across the seas. It was summer when they reached the land to which the woman had been summoned. But, judging from their faces, no summer errand was theirs.

"Walk quicker," said the man, surlily. "We must get there before sunrise. My heart is bent upon it."

"I am fit to drop," said the woman. "How much farther have we to go?"

"According to information, fifteen miles. Walk quicker, quicker! Have you travelled so far to faint at the last moment? Remember we have not a penny left to purchase food, and have already fasted too many hours. I see visions of ease and comfort, of wine and food, ay, and of riches too. I am eager to get at them."

"Do you remember," said the woman, "that you were not bidden to come?"

"What of that?" retorted the man. "I have my tale ready. Leave me to play my part. Our days of poverty are over. This is the last of them. Walk quicker, quicker!"

CHAPTER V

A little after sunrise Basil was awake and out, hastening to the river for his morning bath. He had slept well and soundly, but he had had vivid dreams. The events of the day had sunk deep in his mind; it would have been strange otherwise, for they had altered the currents of his whole future life. They had furnished him with a secure and happy home; they had placed him in a position of responsibility which he hailed with satisfaction and a sense of justifiable pride; moreover, they had assured him that he had won the affection of a kind and generous gentleman and of a sweet-tempered and gentle little maid. He was no longer an outcast; he was no longer alone in the world.

Until this void was supplied he had not felt it. Young, buoyant, and with a fund of animal spirits which was the secret of his cheerful nature, sufficient for the day had been the good thereof; but now quite suddenly an unexpected and sweetly serious duty had been offered to him, and he had accepted it. He would perform it faithfully and conscientiously.

Every word Anthony Bidaud had spoken to him had impressed itself upon his mind. He could have repeated their conversation almost word for word. It was this which had inspired his dreams, which formed, as it were, a panorama of the present and the future.

Annette as she was at this moment, a child, appeared to him and he lived over again their delightful rambles; for although it was but yesterday that they were enjoyed, the duty he had taken upon himself seemed to send them far back into the past; but still Annette was a child, and her sunny ways belonged to childhood. The story of "Paul and Virginia" had been a favourite with him when he was a youngster, and his dreams at first were touched by the colour of that simple tale. The life he had lived these last few weeks on Anthony Bidaud's plantation favoured the resemblance: the South Sea Islanders who worked on the land, the waterfalls, the woods, the solitudes, the protecting bond which linked him to Annette-all formed in his sleeping fancies a companion idyll to the charming creation of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. He carried Annette over the river, he wandered with her through the shadows of the mountains, they were lost and found, they sat together under the shade of the velvet sunflower-tree; and in this part of his dreams he himself was a youth and not a man.

So much for the present, and it was due to his light heart and the happiness he had found that his dreams did not take the colour of the subsequent tragedy which brought the lives of these woodland children to their sad and pathetic end. His future and Annette's was brighter than that of Paul and Virginia. He beheld her as a woman, and he was still her protector. She represented the beauty of the entire world of thought and action. Her figure was faultless, her face most lovely, her movements gracefully perfect. There are countenances upon which an eternal cloud appears to rest, and which even when they smile are not illumined. Upon Annette's countenance rested an eternal sunshine, and this quality of light irradiated not only all surrounding visible objects, but all hopes and feelings of the heart. When Basil awoke these felicitous fancies were not obliterated or weakened, as most such fancies are in waking moments, and as he walked towards the river they lightened his footsteps and made him glad. Wending his way along a cattle track dotted with gum-trees, he saw beneath the branches of one a woman whose face was strange to him. She was not English born, and as she reclined in an attitude of fatigue against the tree's trunk there was about her an air of exhaustion which stirred Basil to compassion for her apparently forlorn condition. He remembered his own days and nights of weary tramping through the bush, and, pausing, he looked down upon her, and she peered up at him through her half-closed lids.

"Good morning," said Basil.

"Is it?" she asked, with a heavy sigh.

"Is it what?"

"Good morning. To me it is a bad morning."

Basil looked round. The heavens were luminous with vivid colour, the birds were flying busily to and from their nests, nature's myriad pulses throbbed with gladness. To him it was the best, the brightest of days. But this sad woman before him was pale and worn; there were traces not only of exhaustion but of hunger in her face.

"You are hungry," said Basil.

"Don't mock me," said the woman, in no gracious tone; "let me rest."

"If you follow this track," persisted Basil, "the way I have come, you will see the Home Station. They will give you breakfast there."

For a moment the woman appeared inclined to accept his kindness she made a movement upwards, but almost immediately she relinquished her intention.

"No," she said, "I will wait."

He was loth to leave her in her distressful plight, but her churlish manner was discouraging.

"Will you not let me help you?"

"You can help me," said the woman, "by leaving me."

He had no alternative. "If you think better of it," he said, "you can obtain shelter and food at the Home Station." Then he passed on to the river.

A stranger was there, already stripping for the purpose of bathing. Scarcely looking at him, Basil was about to remove to a more retired spot when he observed something in the water which caused him to run to the man, who was removing his last garment, and seize his arm.

"What for?" demanded the stranger.

He spoke fairly good English, as did the woman who had declined his assistance, but with a foreign accent. He was brown, and thin, and wrinkled, and Basil saw at once that he was not an Englishman.

"I presume you have not breakfasted yet," was Basil's apparently inconsequential answer to the question.

"Not yet," said the stranger impatiently, shaking himself free from Basil's grasp. "Why do you stop me? Is not the river free?"

"Quite free," said Basil; "but instead of eating you may be eaten."

He pointed downwards, and leaning forward the stranger beheld a huge alligator lurking beneath a thin thicket of reeds. The brute was perfectly motionless, but all its voracious senses were on the alert.

"Ugh!" cried the stranger, beginning to dress hurriedly. "That would be a bad commencement of my business."

He did not say "thank you," nor make the slightest acknowledgment of the service Basil had rendered him. This jarred upon the young man, who stood watching him get into his clothes. They were ragged and travel-stained, and the stranger's physical condition was evidently none of the best; but his eyes were keen, and all his intellectual forces were awake. In this respect Basil found an odd resemblance in him to the alligator waiting for prey in the waving reeds beneath, and also a less odd resemblance to the woman he had left lying in the shadow of the gum-trees.

"You have business here, then?" asked the young man.

"I have-important business. Understand that I answer simply to prove that I am not an intruder."

"I understand. Is the woman I met on my way a relative of yours?"

"What woman?" cried the stranger, in sharp accents. "Like you in face, and bearing about her signs of hard travel."

"Did she speak to you? Why do you question me about her? By what right?"

"There is no particular right in question that I can see?" said Basil. "I spoke to her as I am speaking to you, and asked if I could serve her."

"And she!"

"Was as uncivil as yourself, and declined my offer of assistance."

"She acted well. We are not beggars. For my incivility, that is how you take it. You misconstrue me."

"I am glad to hear it. You seem tired."

"I have been walking all day and all night, and all day and all night again, for more days and nights than I care to count I have done nothing but walk, walk, walk, since my arrival at this world's end."

"Have you but just arrived?"

"Yes, but just arrived, wearied and worn out with nothing but walking, walking, walking. Is that what this world's end was made for?"

If the stranger had not Stated that he had important business to transact, and had there not been something superior in his speech and deportment to the ordinary tramp with whom every man in the Australian colonies is familiar, Basil would have set him down as a member of that delectable fraternity. Notwithstanding this favourable opinion, however, Basil took an instinctive dislike to the man. He had seen in him an odd likeness to the alligator, and brief as had been their interview up to this point, he had gone the length of mentally comparing him now to a fox, now to a jackal-to any member of the brute species indeed whose nature was distinguished by the elements of rapacity and cunning.

"Have you far to go?" he asked.

"No farther," replied the stranger, with an upward glance at Anthony Bidaud's house, one end of which was visible from the spot upon which they were conversing.

"Is that your destination?" inquired Basil, observing the upward glance.

"That," said the stranger, with a light laugh, "is my destination, if I have not been misinformed."

The laugh intensified Basil's dislike; there was a mocking sinister ring in it, but he nevertheless continued the conversation.

"Misinformed in what respect?"

"That is M. Bidaud's house?"

"It is M. Bidaud's house."

"M. Anthony Bidaud?"

"Yes."

"Originally from Switzerland."

Basil's hazard of the stranger's precise nationality now took definite form.

"As you are," he said.

"As I am," said the stranger, "and as Anthony Bidaud is."

"You are right in your surmise. He is from Switzerland."

"My surmise? Ah? He has a fine estate here."

"He has."

"But his wife-she is dead."

"That is so, unhappily."

"What is one man's meat is another man's poison-a proverb that may be reversed." His small eyes glittered, and his thin pointed features seemed all to converge to one point. ("Fox, decidedly," thought Basil.) The stranger continued. "His health, is it good?"

In the light of Anthony Bidaud's revelation on the previous evening this was a startling question, and Basil answered:

"It is an inquiry you had best make of himself if you are likely to see him."

"It is more than likely that I shall see him," said the stranger, "and he will tell me. He has but one child."

"You are well informed. He has but one."

"Whose name is Annette."

"Whose name," said Basil, wondering from what source the stranger had obtained his information, "is Annette."

"Charming, charming, charming," said the stranger. "Everything is charming, except" – with a loathing gesture at the alligator, which lay still as a log, waiting for prey-"that monster; except also that I am dead with fatigue. I came here for a bath to refresh myself after much travelling. Is there any part of this treacherous river in which a man may bathe in safety?"

"I will show you a place."

"No tricks, young sir, said the stranger, suspicion in his voice.

"Why should I play you tricks? If you do not care to trust me, seek a secure spot yourself."

"No, I will accompany you, who must know the river well. You do, eh?"

"I am thoroughly acquainted with it."

"You guessed my nation; shall I guess yours? Australian."

"I am an Englishman."

"A great nation; a great people. Is this the spot?"

They had arrived at a smooth piece of water, semi-circularly protected by rocks from the invasion of alligators.

"This is the spot," said Basil, "you will be perfectly safe here."

The water was so clear that they could see to the bottom. Black and silver bream, perch, mullet, and barramundi were swimming in its translucent depths. The stranger peered carefully among the rocks to make sure that they were free from foes, and then, without thanking Basil, began to strip off his clothes.

"And you-where will you bathe?"

"A little farther up stream. Good morning."

"Ah, good morning; but I may see you again if you are living near."

"I live," said Basil, "in the house yonder."